Two of the four astronauts who recently traveled to the Moon have revealed what they’ve come to realize since returning to Earth.
NASA’s Artemis II team blasted off on April 1 and completed their journey nine days later, touching down safely in an outcome described as a “perfect splashdown.”
Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen made up the quartet who completed the round trip. The flight marked the first time in half a century that humans headed to the Moon, and it also allowed the crew to capture images of rarely seen angles of the lunar surface and of Earth—pushing farther into space than any previous human mission.
About a week after returning home, Glover, Wiseman, Hansen and Koch spoke publicly during a Q&A session at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, on April 16.
Glover—who became the first Black astronaut to travel to deep space—spoke about how the mission felt like something the whole world took part in from the ground.
“I think something that we all feel and we try to share is how much we want to reflect back to you all how we did this, not we as a crew, we as countries and as humans did this,” he said, as per BBC News.
He added that the crew spent time thinking about what it means to see the planet from so far away, including reflecting on “how beautiful Earth is.”
Hansen, meanwhile, said the experience strengthened his belief in people and what we’re capable of when we work toward something bigger than ourselves.
“We don’t always do great things. We’re not always in our integrity, but our default is to be good and to be good to one another,” he said, adding: “What I’ve seen has brought me more joy, but more hope for our future.”
Wiseman also described how the trip affected him emotionally once he was back on Earth—explaining that even with a scientific mindset, he felt compelled to speak to a chaplain.
He shared: “I’m not really a religious person but there was just no other avenue for me to explain anything or to experience anything. So I asked for the chaplain on the Navy ship… and I broke down in tears.
“I don’t think humanity has evolved to the point of being able to comprehend what we’re looking at right now, because it was otherworldly.”
With Artemis II now completed, NASA has also confirmed Artemis III is moving forward.
According to NASA’s website, the mission is expected to lift off at some point next year and will ‘launch crew in the Orion spacecraft on top of the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket to test rendezvous and docking capabilities between Orion and commercial spacecraft needed to land astronauts on the Moon’.